COD Statement

Accounting for COD

When a package is shipped Cash On Delivery (COD), the carrier will ask the recipient for payment of the value of the package. The carrier will then forward checks from multiple recipients together to the sender with a statement detailing the amount received from each shipment and the fee the carrier charges for the service. The recipient may also refuse to pay for the package. In that case, the carrier returns it to the sender undelivered.

In accounting terms, when the order is shipped to the recipient, the responsibility to pay resides with the recipient. Once the carrier has delivered the shipment, the responsibility to pay changes to the carrier. When payment is received from the carrier, then it is applied to the carrier’s receivables balance. In this process, we added a “Pending” state to the responsibility of the carrier to pay shipping charges, so that adjustments to the carrier’s payment could be made before it is made official and posted to the ledger.

Thus, the accounting transactions are:

1. Order is Shipped:

  DR Accounts Receivable (Recipient), 
     CR Sales, etc.

2. Shipment is delivered:

  DR Uninvoiced COD Receipts, 
     CR Accounts Receivable (Recipient)

3. Carrier COD bill is reviewed and approved:

  DR Accounts Receivable (Carrier), 
  DR COD Fees (Expenses)
     CR Uninvoiced COD Receipts

4. Carrier forwards COD payment

  DR Undeposited Receipts (or other Cash account)
     CR Accounts Receivable (Carrier)

If the recipient of the shipment declines to pay, then the receivable for the shipment remains with the recipient as in #1 above. When the package is returned, it should be processed as a return for “Store Credit”, and the billing account credit should be applied to the outstanding invoice of the recipient.

To configuring acacounting for COD statements, a payment method type of “Paid via COD” be configured to the Uninvoiced COD Receipts account and invoice item types “COD Receipt” and “COD Fee” be configured to the Uninvoiced COD Receipts and COD Fees accounts, respectively. An example of this is found in hot-deploy/financials/data/DemoBillCOD.xml